Valve adds VR to Steam's Big Picture mode

Today is the day Valve's Steam Dev Days conference begins. As we learned last week, Valve is expected to release a development toolkit for virtual-reality headsets at the conference. But that's not the only VR-related chunk of goodness Valve has (or had) up its sleeve.

Last night, a Valve staffer by the pseudonym Programmer Joe posted on the Steam Community forums about the addition of a VR mode to the Steam client beta. "As of the most recent Steam Client Beta steam now supports an experimental VR mode," Programmer Joe wrote in the post. "If you own an Oculus Rift dev kit you can try it out by starting Steam with "-vr" on the command line. Then press the Big Picture button to enter Big Picture + VR mode." The post also includes an extra set of instructions in case that doesn't work.

I'd be curious to see how Steam's Big Picture mode looks with VR enabled. The concept certainly sounds neat. Plenty of games already support Oculus, but now, you can also launch them from the comfort a VR interface.

According to that BBC story we talked about last week, Valve has a "long known" relationship with the Oculus VR folks. Valve is also working with other VR firms and developing its own head-tracking and headset manufacturing technology. I'm sure we'll discover more about Valve's VR efforts as time goes on.